HPE DL380p Gen8 25SFF Server - CISS driver

[vrod]

Hi all,

I am looking at installing a newly acquired DL380p 25SFF server as my new freenas SSD box. The server has an intergrated P420i RAID controller. I have updated all firmware and put the RAID controller into HBA mode. I have some questions/issues, there were some previous topics but none of them seem answered.

1) Hot-swap does not work. the ciss driver detects a hot-swap event but does not initialize the drive as a "da-device". Connecting the backplane to a LSI2008 pci card makes hot-swap work perfectly.
2) Write speeds are bad. Erasing a single S3700 SSD cannot pull more than 60MB/s. Starting an erase of a second S3700 cuts the speed almost in half (30-35MB/s for each SSD).. Trying this on the LSI card, they pull all 110-120MB/s without a hitch.

As far as I could read, the CISS driver is relatively old, is there any alternative? I would love to use the onboard controller and on ubuntu it seems like the P420 has no problems working properly. However I guess I could always use the LSI controller in the pcie slot? I would really like to keep using freenas for the project.

Anyone who is also or have also faced this issue and eventually resolved it?

 

[Meyers]

Just thinking out loud here: most of the time when you hear someone talking HP RAID they are using it with ZFS on top of RAID which is obviously a big no-no. HBA mode must be a relatively new thing (I don't remember it at all up to 2016 when I retired my last HP box) so I suspect there aren't nearly as many people using these HP cards vs. the LSI/Avago/Broadcom cards. In fact, I'm betting that if you search P420 you'll almost exclusively see people being chastised for using them.

What do you mean by erasing / write speeds? What exactly are you doing?

If I were you, I would just use the LSI card and be done with it. Sounds like you already have experience with the LSI card working perfectly. It's such a cheap and easy thing to do that it's not worth the effort fighting with the built-in HP card. Just my two cents.

 

[vrod]

Yes you might be right... Probably it could be easier just going with the HP card...

The tests I'm doing are just dd'ing the drives with zero and a bs=1M. Using the LSI card isn't a nightmare for me but it would of course be awesome to use something which is completely integrated in the board :) and save a PCIe slot as well.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Based on previous user posts on this forum of users having issues with the P420i, even in "HBA mode", I'd strongly recommend going with a well-supported and well-understood LSI model instead.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/freenas-only-detecting-2-drives-of-smart-array-p420i.69973/page-2

 

[Mlovelace]

Hi all,

I am looking at installing a newly acquired DL380p 25SFF server as my new freenas SSD box. The server has an intergrated P420i RAID controller. I have updated all firmware and put the RAID controller into HBA mode. I have some questions/issues, there were some previous topics but none of them seem answered.

1) Hot-swap does not work. the ciss driver detects a hot-swap event but does not initialize the drive as a "da-device". Connecting the backplane to a LSI2008 pci card makes hot-swap work perfectly.
2) Write speeds are bad. Erasing a single S3700 SSD cannot pull more than 60MB/s. Starting an erase of a second S3700 cuts the speed almost in half (30-35MB/s for each SSD).. Trying this on the LSI card, they pull all 110-120MB/s without a hitch.

As far as I could read, the CISS driver is relatively old, is there any alternative? I would love to use the onboard controller and on ubuntu it seems like the P420 has no problems working properly. However I guess I could always use the LSI controller in the pcie slot? I would really like to keep using freenas for the project.

Anyone who is also or have also faced this issue and eventually resolved it?

The HBA mode for the P420i and the P440 never seems to work well in the VMware forums when people are trying to implement vSAN. Problems with hotswap or even building the array, and if they do get the drives recognized the performance is abysmal.

Example of many threads over there... https://communities.vmware.com/message/2774670#2774670

Just use the LSI HBA.

 

[HoneyBadger]

The HBA mode for the P420i and the P440 never seems to work well in the VMware forums when people are trying to implement vSAN. Problems with hotswap or even building the array, and if they do get the drives recognized the performance is abysmal.

I believe the poor vSAN performance is down to the unit defaulting to an adapter queue depth of 32 if there's no cache module. So you have to buy that module to have it there to unlock the queue depth, and then disable it so it can sit there unused.

 

[vrod]

I guess it's the LSI then... :) It does make great sense to go with that one. I have the SAS cables and everything, I will have to get a second riser but they are like 25€! I am getting the 10x 4510's for the project tomorrow and will conduct a heavy test!

A side question... I was thinking of getting a 530FLR adapter but this seems to run on the Qlogic 57810 chipset... which according to previous posts is not supported. does anyone here know if something like the 556FLR or 560FLR would work? I am not able to find out what chip they use but I would suppose that at least one of the HP FlexLOM adapters would use Intel chips??

Found some information from the german part of the OPNSense forum that the "560FLR" card should be using the Intel 82599 chip. grrr costs a bit more than the 530FLR :(

 

[Meyers]

If you can't confirm that it works with this release of FreeNAS/BSD then I wouldn't chance it.

 

[vrod]

I know for a fact that the Mellanox ConnectX cards work well with FreeNAS but then I guess I will have to get a second riser card so I can install it.. and I can get 2 dual port connectx cards for the same price as a single flexlom. Anyways, thank you guys. :)

 

[vrod]

First of all thanks to all of you which came with suggestions...

It's been a while and I put in the SAS2008 HBA. However, it was not really performing that well on zfs. When trying to TRIM the SSD's, i found that this controller does not support TRIM (only for specific SSD's it seem). I tried Ubuntu with ZFS and there the P420i performs really well (hpsa driver).

However, I am unable to even get any good performance there as well. The optane 900p doesn't even seem to do anything during stress tests and the backend SSDs themselves have a max utilization of 50%.

I kinda wanna get started on freenas again with ZFS but can anyone recommend a HBA like the SAS2008 for 6gbps SATA but which actually supports TRIM properly? :)

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

It is probably in the hardware recommendations someplace, but an LSI 9207-8i flashed to the most current IT firmware is the way to go. Search the forums for LSI firmware flash. There are some good articles on that. Those cards are ~= $50 on eBay.

 

[HoneyBadger]

All LSI HBAs require the SSD to support a specific feature called "Read Zero After TRIM" or "RZAT" - the DC S3700 does support this feature.

That said, I've heard reports that the SAS2008-based cards still don't TRIM anything correctly. The SAS2308 (9207-8i) is supposed to be better, and I've heard that the 9300-8i based on the SAS3008 actually works correctly, but it's a non-trivial amount of additional money to get the latter.